How Do We Construct Our Story?

December 14, 2025

I’m working with an author right now who is looking at early memories in light of what they know now as an older adult. This work has made me consider the ways in which we construct our own life stories.

Memory is very person and situation-dependent. That’s why two children from the same household who were raised by the same parents in basically the same way can have such vastly different stories about their growing up years. Neither is wrong; the things they remember and the way they remember them are just different.

I collected twenty-five years’ worth of memories in book form for my daughter’s twenty-fifth birthday recently. In the prologue, I wrote “Memory is a funny thing. You were absolutely there for everything I write about on the following pages, but many of the events you won’t remember…and the later events you do remember, you may remember completely differently from how I have recorded them, and that’s okay. That’s how memory works. I’d love to hear your spin!”

As individuals, we each pay attention to different aspects of a situation—I may notice the colors and the people; you may be struck by the odors or sounds. We’re also primed to pick up different nuances for personal reasons.

As a mom, I may notice how cold the air is, how my child is shivering, and I may remember they just got over a bad cold so I had to take two days off work which the boss didn’t like. My memory of our exit from the event may be that it was unfortunate but necessary. As a child, you may notice how much fun everyone is having at the ice rink, how happy you are to be back with your friends, and how great it is to finally not have a runny nose. Your memory of our exit may be how mean I am for making you leave. Individual contexts color our memories vividly.

We can reconstruct our story by layering our adult knowledge on top of our childhood memories. Another way is to layer multiple versions of the same memory on top of one another which can give the event real depth. A participant in one of my groups recently spoke about an online program they had done with their siblings. One would answer a prompt and email their recollections to the others. Each sibling would add their recollections to the original response. Over the course of a year, they collected 52 of these compilations. What a multi-dimensional family story!

I also love the idea of having versions of yourself to speak to each other. A young Ansley recounts a memory. The adult Ansley responds to the young one’s recollection by enlarging on it—as an adult I may know why something happened that I didn’t know as a child. When we are able to look at our experiences through more than one set of eyes—the person we were when the event was happening and the person we are now, we enlarge our understanding of ourselves. We all came from somewhere and we all do what we do for some reason. The ability to recognize that gives us agency in future chapters of our story.